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Chapter 4. Magic and Religion
The examples collected in the last chapter may suffice to illustrate the
general principles of sympathetic magic in its two branches, to which we have
given the names of Homoeopathic and Contagious respectively. In some cases of
magic which have come before us we have seen that the operation of spirits is
assumed, and that an attempt is made to win their favour by prayer and
sacrifice. But these cases are on the whole exceptional; they exhibit magic
tinged and alloyed with religion. Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its
pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another
necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or
personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of
modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and
firm, in the order and uniformity of nature. The magician does not doubt that
the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of
the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be
attended by the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations should chance
to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer. He
supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward
being: he abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power, great as he
believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it
only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may
be called the laws of nature as conceived by him. To neglect these rules, to
break these laws in the smallest particular, is to incur failure, and may even
expose the unskilful practitioner himself to the utmost peril. If he claims a
sovereignty over nature, it is a constitutional sovereignty rigorously limited
in its scope and exercised in exact conformity with ancient usage. Thus the
analogy between the magical and the scientific conceptions of the world is
close. In both of them the succession of events is assumed to be perfectly
regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws, the operation of
which can be foreseen and calculated precisely; the elements of caprice, of
chance, and of accident are banished from the course of nature. Both of them
open up a seemingly boundless vista of possibilities to him who knows the
causes of things and can touch the secret springs that set in motion the vast
and intricate mechanism of the world. Hence the strong attraction which magic
and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful
stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary
enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in
the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the
top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and
rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be,
but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence
of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of
the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyse the various
cases of sympathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceding
pages, and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I
have already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or
other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of
ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or
time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homoeopathic or
imitative magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces
contagious magic. The principles of association are excellent in themselves,
and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately
applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the
bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to
say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become
true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the earliest
times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the
order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has
scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of
them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied
science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
If magic is thus next of kin to science, we have still to enquire how it
stands related to religion. But the view we take of that relation will
necessarily be coloured by the idea which we have formed of the nature of
religion itself; hence a writer may reasonably be expected to define his
conception of religion before he proceeds to investigate its relation to
magic. There is probably no subject in the world about which opinions differ
so much as the nature of religion, and to frame a definition of it which would
satisfy every one must obviously be impossible. All that a writer can do is,
first, to say clearly what he means by religion, and afterwards to employ the
word consistently in that sense throughout his work. By religion, then, I
understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are
believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. Thus
defined, religion consists of two elements, a theoretical and a practical,
namely, a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or
please them. Of the two, belief clearly comes first, since we must believe in
the existence of a divine being before we can attempt to please him. But
unless the belief leads to a corresponding practice, it is not a religion but
merely a theology; in the language of St. James, faith, if it hath not works,
is dead, being alone. In other words, no man is religious who does not govern
his conduct in some measure by the fear or love of God. On the other hand,
mere practice, divested of all religious belief, is also not religion. Two men
may behave in exactly the same way, and yet one of them may be religious and
the other not. If the one acts from the love or fear of God, he is religious;
if the other acts from the love or fear of man, he is moral or immoral
according as his behaviour comports or conflicts with the general good. Hence
belief and practice or, in theological language, faith and works are equally
essential to religion, which cannot exist without both of them. But it is not
necessary that religious practice should always take the form of a ritual;
that is, it need not consist in the offering of sacrifice, the recitation of
prayers, and other outward ceremonies. Its aim is to please the deity, and if
the deity is one who delights in charity and mercy and purity more than in
oblations of blood, the chanting of hymns, and the fumes of incense, his
worshippers will best please him, not by prostrating themselves before him, by
intoning his praises, and by filling his temples with costly gifts, but by
being pure and merciful and charitable towards men, for in so doing they will
imitate, so far as human infirmity allows, the perfections of the divine
nature. It was this ethical side of religion which the Hebrew prophets,
inspired with a noble ideal of God's goodness and holiness, were never weary
of inculcating. Thus Micah says: He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with thy God? And at a later time much of the force by
which Christianity conquered the world was drawn from the same high conception
of God's moral nature and the duty laid on men of conforming themselves to it.
Pure religion and undefiled, says St. James, before God and the Father is
this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep
himself unspotted from the world.
But if religion involves, first, a belief in superhuman beings who rule
the world, and, second, an attempt to win their favour, it clearly assumes
that the course of nature is to some extent elastic or variable, and that we
can persuade or induce the mighty beings who control it to deflect, for our
benefit, the current of events from the channel in which they would otherwise
flow. Now this implied elasticity or variability of nature is directly opposed
to the principles of magic as well as of science, both of which assume that
the processes of nature are rigid and invariable in their operation, and that
they can as little be turned from their course by persuasion and entreaty as
by threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two conflicting views
of the universe turns on their answer to the crucial question, Are the forces
which govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal?
Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers, assumes the former
member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies that the being
conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his conduct is in some
measure uncertain, and that he can be prevailed upon to vary it in the desired
direction by a judicious appeal to his interests, his appetites, or his
emotions. Conciliation is never employed towards things which are regarded as
inanimate, nor towards persons whose behaviour in the particular circumstances
is known to be determined with absolute certainty. Thus in so far as religion
assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from
their purpose by persuasion, it stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as
well as to science, both of which take for granted that the course of nature
is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the
operation of immutable laws acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the
assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that
magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed
by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them
exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it
constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion
would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings, whether human or divine,
are in the last resort subject to those impersonal forces which control all
things, but which nevertheless can be turned to account by any one who knows
how to manipulate them by the appropriate ceremonies and spells. In ancient
Egypt, for example, the magicians claimed the power of compelling even the
highest gods to do their bidding, and actually threatened them with
destruction in case of disobedience. Sometimes, without going quite so far as
that, the wizard declared that he would scatter the bones of Osiris or reveal
his sacred legend, if the god proved contumacious. Similarly in India at the
present day the great Hindoo trinity itself of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva is
subject to the sorcerers, who, by means of their spells, exercise such an
ascendency over the mightiest deities, that these are bound submissively to
execute on earth below, or in heaven above, whatever commands their masters
the magicians may please to issue. There is a saying everywhere current in
India: The whole universe is subject to the gods; the gods are subject to the
spells (mantras); the spells to the Brahmans; therefore the Brahmans are our
gods.
This radical conflict of principle between magic and religion sufficiently
explains the relentless hostility with which in history the priest has often
pursued the magician. The haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his
arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to
exercise a sway like theirs could not but revolt the priest, to whom, with his
awful sense of the divine majesty, and his humble prostration in presence of
it, such claims and such a demeanour must have appeared an impious and
blasphemous usurpation of prerogatives that belong to God alone. And
sometimes, we may suspect, lower motives concurred to whet the edge of the
priest's hostility. He professed to be the proper medium, the true intercessor
between God and man, and no doubt his interests as well as his feelings were
often injured by a rival practitioner, who preached a surer and smoother road
to fortune than the rugged and slippery path of divine favour.
Yet this antagonism, familiar as it is to us, seems to have made its
appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an earlier stage
the functions of priest and sorcerer were often combined or, to speak perhaps
more correctly, were not yet differentiated from each other. To serve his
purpose man wooed the good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice,
while at the same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which
he hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the help
of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and magical rites
simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost in the same breath,
knowing or recking little of the theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour,
so long as by hook or crook he contrived to get what he wanted. Instances of
this fusion or confusion of magic with religion have already met us in the
practices of Melanesians and of other peoples.
The same confusion of magic and religion has survived among peoples that
have risen to higher levels of culture. It was rife in ancient India and
ancient Egypt; it is by no means extinct among European peasantry at the
present day. With regard to ancient India we are told by an eminent Sanscrit
scholar that the sacrificial ritual at the earliest period of which we have
detailed information is pervaded with practices that breathe the spirit of the
most primitive magic. Speaking of the importance of magic in the East, and
especially in Egypt, Professor Maspero remarks that we ought not to attach to
the word magic the degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the
mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The
faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a god had no chance of
succeeding except by laying hands on the deity, and this arrest could only be
effected by means of a certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and
chants, which the god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do what
was demanded of him.
Among the ignorant classes of modern Europe the same confusion of ideas,
the same mixture of religion and magic, crops up in various forms. Thus we are
told that in France the majority of the peasants still believe that the
priest possesses a secret and irresistible power over the elements. By
reciting certain prayers which he alone knows and has the right to utter, yet
for the utterance of which he must afterwards demand absolution, he can, on an
occasion of pressing danger, arrest or reverse for a moment the action of the
eternal laws of the physical world. The winds, the storms, the hail, and the
rain are at his command and obey his will. The fire also is subject to him,
and the flames of a conflagration are extinguished at his word. For example,
French peasants used to be, perhaps are still, persuaded that the priests
could celebrate, with certain special rites, a Mass of the Holy Spirit, of
which the efficacy was so miraculous that it never met with any opposition
from the divine will; God was forced to grant whatever was asked of Him in
this form, however rash and importunate might be the petition. No idea of
impiety or irreverence attached to the rite in the minds of those who, in some
of the great extremities of life, sought by this singular means to take the
kingdom of heaven by storm. The secular priests generally refused to say the
Mass of the Holy Spirit; but the monks, especially the Capuchin friars, had
the reputation of yielding with less scruple to the entreaties of the anxious
and distressed. In the constraint thus supposed by Catholic peasantry to be
laid by the priest upon the deity we seem to have an exact counterpart of the
power which the ancient Egyptians ascribed to their magicians. Again, to take
another example, in many villages of Provence the priest is still reputed to
possess the faculty of averting storms. It is not every priest who enjoys this
reputation; and in some villages, when a change of pastors takes place, the
parishioners are eager to learn whether the new incumbent has the power
(pouder), as they call it. At the first sign of a heavy storm they put him
to the proof by inviting him to exorcise the threatening clouds; and if the
result answers to their hopes, the new shepherd is assured of the sympathy and
respect of his flock. In some parishes, where the reputation of the curate in
this respect stood higher than that of his rector, the relations between the
two have been so strained in consequence that the bishop has had to translate
the rector to another benefice. Again, Gascon peasants believe that to revenge
themselves on their enemies bad men will sometimes induce a priest to say a
mass called the Mass of Saint Sécaire. Very few priests know this mass, and
three-fourths of those who do know it would not say it for love or money. None
but wicked priests dare to perform the gruesome ceremony, and you may be quite
sure that they will have a very heavy account to render for it at the last
day. No curate or bishop, not even the archbishop of Auch, can pardon them;
that right belongs to the pope of Rome alone. The Mass of Saint Sécaire may be
said only in a ruined or deserted church, where owls mope and hoot, where bats
flit in the gloaming, where gypsies lodge of nights, and where toads squat
under the desecrated altar. Thither the bad priest comes by night with his
light o' love, and at the first stroke of eleven he begins to mumble the mass
backwards, and ends just as the clocks are knelling the midnight hour. His
leman acts as clerk. The host he blesses is black and has three points; he
consecrates no wine, but instead he drinks the water of a well into which the
body of an unbaptized infant has been flung. He makes the sign of the cross,
but it is on the ground and with his left foot. And many other things he does
which no good Christian could look upon without being struck blind and deaf
and dumb for the rest of his life. But the man for whom the mass is said
withers away little by little, and nobody can say what is the matter with him;
even the doctors can make nothing of it. They do not know that he is slowly
dying of the Mass of Saint Sécaire.
Yet though magic is thus found to fuse and amalgamate with religion in
many ages and in many lands, there are some grounds for thinking that this
fusion is not primitive, and that there was a time when man trusted to magic
alone for the satisfaction of such wants as transcended his immediate animal
cravings. In the first place a consideration of the fundamental notions of
magic and religion may incline us to surmise that magic is older than religion
in the history of humanity. We have seen that on the one hand magic is nothing
but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary processes
of the mind, namely the association of ideas by virtue of resemblance or
contiguity; and that on the other hand religion assumes the operation of
conscious or personal agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen of
nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex than a
simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a theory
which assumes that the course of nature is determined by conscious agents is
more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a far higher
degree of intelligence and reflection, than the view that things succeed each
other simply by reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The very beasts
associate the ideas of things that are like each other or that have been found
together in their experience; and they could hardly survive for a day if they
ceased to do so. But who attributes to the animals a belief that the phenomena
of nature are worked by a multitude of invisible animals or by one enormous
and prodigiously strong animal behind the scenes? It is probably no injustice
to the brutes to assume that the honour of devising a theory of this latter
sort must be reserved for human reason. Thus, if magic be deduced immediately
from elementary processes of reasoning, and be, in fact, an error into which
the mind falls almost spontaneously, while religion rests on conceptions which
the merely animal intelligence can hardly be supposed to have yet attained to,
it becomes probable that magic arose before religion in the evolution of our
race, and that man essayed to bend nature to his wishes by the sheer force of
spells and enchantments before he strove to coax and mollify a coy,
capricious, or irascible deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and
sacrifice.
The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a consideration
of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is confirmed inductively by the
observation that among the aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to
whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas
religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers
seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are
magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his
fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of
propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.
But if in the most backward state of human society now known to us we find
magic thus conspicuously present and religion conspicuously absent, may we not
reasonably conjecture that the civilised races of the world have also at some
period of their history passed through a similar intellectual phase, that they
attempted to force the great powers of nature to do their pleasure before they
thought of courting their favour by offerings and prayer, in short that, just
as on the material side of human culture there has everywhere been an Age of
Stone, so on the intellectual side there has everywhere been an Age of Magic?
There are reasons for answering this question in the affirmative. When we
survey the existing races of mankind from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, or
from Scotland to Singapore, we observe that they are distinguished one from
the other by a great variety of religions, and that these distinctions are
not, so to speak, merely coterminous with the broad distinctions of race, but
descend into the minuter subdivisions of states and commonwealths, nay, that
they honeycomb the town, the village, and even the family, so that the surface
of society all over the world is cracked and seamed, sapped and mined with
rents and fissures and yawning crevasses opened up by the disintegrating
influence of religious dissension. Yet when we have penetrated through these
differences, which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the
community, we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual
agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who
constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind. One of the great
achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this low
mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus to discover its
substantial identity everywhere. It is beneath our feet, and not very far
beneath them, here in Europe at the present day, and it crops up on the surface
in the heart of the Australian wilderness and wherever the advent of a higher
civilisation has not crushed it under ground. This universal faith, this truly
Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of magic. While religious systems
differ not only in different countries, but in the same country in different
ages, the system of sympathetic magic remains everywhere and at all times
substantially alike in its principles and practice. Among the ignorant and
superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was thousands
of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among the lowest savages
surviving in the remotest corners of the world. If the test of truth lay in a
show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with
far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper,
quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, as the sure and certain credential of its own
infallibility.
It is not our business here to consider what bearing the permanent
existence of such a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society,
and unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture, has upon
the future of humanity. The dispassionate observer, whose studies have led him
to plumb its depths, can hardly regard it otherwise than as a standing menace
to civilisation. We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be
rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow
murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is
going on beneath our feet. Now and then the polite world is startled by a
paragraph in a newspaper which tells how in Scotland an image has been found
stuck full of pins for the purpose of killing an obnoxious laird or minister,
how a woman has been slowly roasted to death as a witch in Ireland, or how a
girl has been murdered and chopped up in Russia to make those candles of human
tallow by whose light thieves hope to pursue their midnight trade unseen. But
whether the influences that make for further progress, or those that threaten
to undo what has already been accomplished, will ultimately prevail; whether
the impulsive energy of the minority or the dead weight of the majority of
mankind will prove the stronger force to carry us up to higher heights or to
sink us into lower depths, are questions rather for the sage, the moralist,
and the statesman, whose eagle vision scans the future, than for the humble
student of the present and the past. Here we are only concerned to ask how far
the uniformity, the universality, and the permanence of a belief in magic,
compared with the endless variety and the shifting character of religious
creeds, raises a presumption that the former represents a ruder and earlier
phase of the human mind, through which all the races of mankind have passed or
are passing on their way to religion and science.
If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise, been
preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we should enquire what causes
have led mankind, or rather a portion of them, to abandon magic as a principle
of faith and practice and to betake themselves to religion instead. When we
reflect upon the multitude, the variety, and the complexity of the facts to be
explained, and the scantiness of our information regarding them, we shall be
ready to acknowledge that a full and satisfactory solution of so profound a
problem is hardly to be hoped for, and that the most we can do in the present
state of our knowledge is to hazard a more or less plausible conjecture. With
all due diffidence, then, I would suggest that a tardy recognition of the
inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of
mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method
of turning her resources to account. The shrewder intelligences must in time
have come to perceive that magical ceremonies and incantations did not really
effect the results which they were designed to produce, and which the majority
of their simpler fellows still believed that they did actually produce. This
great discovery of the inefficacy of magic must have wrought a radical though
probably slow revolution in the minds of those who had the sagacity to make
it. The discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time recognised
their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which
hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It was a
confession of human ignorance and weakness. Man saw that he had taken for
causes what were no causes, and that all his efforts to work by means of these
imaginary causes had been vain. His painful toil had been wasted, his curious
ingenuity had been squandered to no purpose. He had been pulling at strings to
which nothing was attached; he had been marching, as he thought, straight to
the goal, while in reality he had only been treading in a narrow circle. Not
that the effects which he had striven so hard to produce did not continue to
manifest themselves. They were still produced, but not by him. The rain still
fell on the thirsty ground: the sun still pursued his daily, and the moon her
nightly journey across the sky: the silent procession of the seasons still
moved in light and shadow, in cloud and sunshine across the earth: men were
still born to labour and sorrow, and still, after a brief sojourn here, were
gathered to their fathers in the long home hereafter. All things indeed went
on as before, yet all seemed different to him from whose eyes the old scales
had fallen. For he could no longer cherish the pleasing illusion that it was
he who guided the earth and the heaven in their courses, and that they would
cease to perform their great revolutions were he to take his feeble hand from
the wheel. In the death of his enemies and his friends he no longer saw a
proof of the resistless potency of his own or of hostile enchantments; he now
knew that friends and foes alike had succumbed to a force stronger than any
that he could wield, and in obedience to a destiny which he was powerless to
control.
Thus cut adrift from his ancient moorings and left to toss on a troubled
sea of doubt and uncertainty, his old happy confidence in himself and his
powers rudely shaken, our primitive philosopher must have been sadly perplexed
and agitated till he came to rest, as in a quiet haven after a tempestuous
voyage, in a new system of faith and practice, which seemed to offer a
solution of his harassing doubts and a substitute, however precarious, for
that sovereignty over nature which he had reluctantly abdicated. If the great
world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely
be because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger, who,
unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all the varied series
of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic. It
was they, as he now believed, and not he himself, who made the stormy wind to
blow, the lightning to flash, and the thunder to roll; who had laid the
foundations of the solid earth and set bounds to the restless sea that it
might not pass; who caused all the glorious lights of heaven to shine; who
gave the fowls of the air their meat and the wild beasts of the desert their
prey; who bade the fruitful land to bring forth in abundance, the high hills
to be clothed with forests, the bubbling springs to rise under the rocks in
the valleys, and green pastures to grow by still waters; who breathed into
man's nostrils and made him live, or turned him to destruction by famine and
pestilence and war. To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in all
the gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly
confessing his dependence on their invisible power, and beseeching them of
their mercy to furnish him with all good things, to defend him from the perils
and dangers by which our mortal life is compassed about on every hand, and
finally to bring his immortal spirit, freed from the burden of the body, to
some happier world, beyond the reach of pain and sorrow, where he might rest
with them and with the spirits of good men in joy and felicity for ever.
In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived to
have made the great transition from magic to religion. But even in them the
change can hardly ever have been sudden; probably it proceeded very slowly,
and required long ages for its more or less perfect accomplishment. For the
recognition of man's powerlessness to influence the course of nature on a
grand scale must have been gradual; he cannot have been shorn of the whole of
his fancied dominion at a blow. Step by step he must have been driven back
from his proud position; foot by foot he must have yielded, with a sigh, the
ground which he had once viewed as his own. Now it would be the wind, now the
rain, now the sunshine, now the thunder, that he confessed himself unable to
wield at will; and as province after province of nature thus fell from his
grasp, till what had once seemed a kingdom threatened to shrink into a prison,
man must have been more and more profoundly impressed with a sense of his own
helplessness and the might of the invisible beings by whom he believed himself
to be surrounded. Thus religion, beginning as a slight and partial
acknowledgment of powers superior to man, tends with the growth of knowledge
to deepen into a confession of man's entire and absolute dependence on the
divine; his old free bearing is exchanged for an attitude of lowliest
prostration before the mysterious powers of the unseen, and his highest virtue
is to submit his will to theirs: In la sua volontade è nostra pace. But this
deepening sense of religion, this more perfect submission to the divine will
in all things, affects only those higher intelligences who have breadth of
view enough to comprehend the vastness of the universe and the littleness of
man. Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension,
their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but
themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all. They are, indeed,
drilled by their betters into an outward conformity with its precepts and a
verbal profession of its tenets; but at heart they cling to their old magical
superstitions, which may be discountenanced and forbidden, but cannot be
eradicated by religion, so long as they have their roots deep down in the
mental framework and constitution of the great majority of mankind.
The reader may well be tempted to ask, How was it that intelligent men did
not sooner detect the fallacy of magic? How could they continue to cherish
expectations that were invariably doomed to disappointment? With what heart
persist in playing venerable antics that led to nothing, and mumbling solemn
balderdash that remained without effect? Why cling to beliefs which were so
flatly contradicted by experience? How dare to repeat experiments that had
failed so often? The answer seems to be that the fallacy was far from easy to
detect, the failure by no means obvious, since in many, perhaps in most cases,
the desired event did actually follow, at a longer or shorter interval, the
performance of the rite which was designed to bring it about; and a mind of
more than common acuteness was needed to perceive that, even in these cases,
the rite was not necessarily the cause of the event. A ceremony intended to
make the wind blow or the rain fall, or to work the death of an enemy, will
always be followed, sooner or later, by the occurrence it is meant to bring to
pass; and primitive man may be excused for regarding the occurrence as a
direct result of the ceremony, and the best possible proof of its efficacy.
Similarly, rites observed in the morning to help the sun to rise, and in
spring to wake the dreaming earth from her winter sleep, will invariably
appear to be crowned with success, at least within the temperate zones; for in
these regions the sun lights his golden lamp in the east every morning, and
year by year the vernal earth decks herself afresh with a rich mantle of
green. Hence the practical savage, with his conservative instincts, might well
turn a deaf ear to the subtleties of the theoretical doubter, the philosophic
radical, who presumed to hint that sunrise and spring might not, after all, be
direct consequences of the punctual performance of certain daily or yearly
ceremonies, and that the sun might perhaps continue to rise and trees to
blossom though the ceremonies were occasionally intermitted, or even
discontinued altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally be repelled by
the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries subversive of the faith
and manifestly contradicted by experience. Can anything be plainer, he might
say, than that I light my twopenny candle on earth and that the sun then
kindles his great fire in heaven? I should be glad to know whether, when I
have put on my green robe in spring, the trees do not afterwards do the same?
These are facts patent to everybody, and on them I take my stand. I am a plain
practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers
of logic. Theories and speculation and all that may be very well in their way,
and I have not the least objection to your indulging in them, provided, of
course, you do not put them in practice. But give me leave to stick to facts;
then I know where I am. The fallacy of this reasoning is obvious to us,
because it happens to deal with facts about which we have long made up our
minds. But let an argument of precisely the same calibre be applied to matters
which are still under debate, and it may be questioned whether a British
audience would not applaud it as sound, and esteem the speaker who used it a
safe mannot brilliant or showy, perhaps, but thoroughly sensible and
hard-headed. If such reasonings could pass muster among ourselves, need we
wonder that they long escaped detection by the savage?
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